Artificial intelligence (“AI”) is generating more than content; it is generating lawsuits. Here is a brief chronology of what I believe are the most significant lawsuits that have been filed so far.
The post Generative-AI: The Top 12 Lawsuits appeared first on Cokato Copyright Attorney: The Law Blog of Thomas James.
Law Office of Tom James Blogs
Latest from Law Office of Tom James
Enduring (Non-AI) Legal Issues
With so much attention being given to the legal issues that AI-powered technologies are generating, it can be easy to overlook or underestimate the importance of long-standing legal issues having nothing to do with artificial intelligence. While it would be neither possible nor particularly useful to catalog all of them in a single blog post,
Last Exit From Paradise
The United States Supreme Court has put an end to Stephen Thaler’s crusade for machine rights. Okay, that’s the sensational news article way of putting it. He wasn’t really crusading for machine rights. He was trying to establish a precedent for claiming copyright in AI-generated works.
I first wrote about this back in May, 2022
Trump’s Executive Order on AI
On December 11, 2025, President Trump issued another Executive Order. This one is intended to promote “national dominance” in “a race with adversaries for supremacy.” To “win,” the Order says, AI companies should not be encumbered by state regulation. “The policy of the United States,” the Order says, is “to sustain and enhance the
Voice Cloning
Lehrman v. Lovo, Inc.
On July 10, 2025, the federal district court for the Southern District of New York issued an Order granting in part and denying in part a motion to dismiss a putative class action lawsuit that
Court Rules AI Training is Fair Use
Just days after the first major fair use ruling in a generative-AI case, a second court has determined that using copyrighted works to train AI is fair use. Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms, No. 3:23-cv-03417-VC (N.D. Cal. June 25, 2025).
The Kadrey v. Meta Platforms Lawsuit
I previously wrote about this lawsuit here
AI OK; Piracy Not: Bartz v. Anthropic
A federal judge has issued a landmark fair use decision in a generative-AI copyright infringement lawsuit.
In a previous blog post, I wrote about the fair use decision in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS. As I explained there, that case involved a search-and-retrieval AI system, so the holding was not determinative of fair use
Court of Appeals Affirms Registration Refusal for AI-Generated Output
In 2019, Stephen Thaler developed an AI system he called The Creativity Machine. He generated output he called A Recent Entrance to Paradise. When he applied to register a copyright claim in the output, he listed the machine as the author. He claimed ownership of the work as a work made for hire. In his
Copyrights in AI-Generated Content
The U.S. Copyright Office has issued its long-awaited report on the copyrightability of works created using AI-generated output. The legality of using copyrighted works to train generative-AI systems is a topic for another day.
Key takeaways:
- Copyright protects the elements of a work that are created by a human, but does not protect elements that
Fair Use Decision in Thomson Reuters v. Ross
A court has handed down the first known ruling (to me, anyway) on “fair use” in the wave of copyright infringement lawsuits against AI companies that are pending in federal courts. The ruling came in Thomas Reuters v. Ross. Thomas Reuters filed this lawsuit against Ross Intelligence back in 2020, alleging that Ross trained its